In Brief

VISC Presents $100K Worth of Street Data

The Visual Information Systems Center (VISC) within Pitt’s School of Information Sciences recently gave information to City of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) officials that should help improve response time for emergency personnel, aid in urban planning, and improve the educational process.

VISC researchers presented officials—including Mike Homa, geographical information systems (GIS) manager of Pittsburgh’s Department of City Planning, and Jim Frank, GIS manager for Allegheny County—with CDs containing the Pittsburgh Street Data Update, valued at $100,000.

The Pittsburgh Street Data Update contains the most accurate address information ever compiled for Pittsburgh. The update was created by Christopher Temple, senior GIS analyst for PPS, and Robert Regan, visiting research professor in the VISC.

An outgrowth of the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ resource reallocation initiative and from research Regan conducted for his book The Steps of Pittsburgh (Local History Co., 2004), the project combines physical street address surveys with state-of-the-art computerized tools to locate any address within the City of Pittsburgh and Mount Oliver.

“This data provides much more accurate street-range addresses than were previously available,” said Matthew Kelley, research analyst at VISC. “People in Allegheny County emergency management should find it quite helpful.” In addition, the data will be provided to the Pittsburgh fire and police departments.

Refinements made through the Pittsburgh Street Data Update effort are included in the 2005 Pittsburgh Public Schools Data and Technology Atlas, which provides information on where students and schools are located and other data. “The goal of the atlas is to provide critical information for education decision-making,” said Kelley. “Teachers, parents, and school and district administrators will find information to improve the educational process.”

The 2005 atlas is the result of a data and spatial analysis of the school district and includes student, school, and district analyses of demographics, geographic data, and enrollment. Produced as part of the VISC’s Project VIPER (Visualizing Information for Pittsburgh Public Schools Evaluation and Research), under the direction of Pitt assistant professor and VISC director Ken Sochats and his team, along with Temple, the atlas is available online at http://visc.sis.pitt.edu, where it will be continually updated. • Karen Hoffman